Bradley Cooper to Adapt Dan Simmons’ ‘Hyperion’ Series?

The Hangover actor is negotiating to adapt the award-winning science fiction novels himself.

Bradley Cooper's having a hell of a weekend: despite our profoundly negative review, The Hangover Part II is making more money than the Willem Dafoe in To Live and Die in L.A. (Too obscure?) Now the leading man wants to get behind the camera. This week he told Charlie Rose that he's actively pursuing a screenwriting gig, adapting Dan Simmons' acclaimed science fiction series TheHyperion Cantos to the silver screen. Graham King, producer of The Departed, currently owns the rights.

Quoth the Cooper: "My friend and I, Conal Byrne, went to Graham King […] and we wrote a treatment on spec, saying, 'Look, I know this is a very audacious endeavor, but can you just read this spec we wrote? We think we have a way in to tell the story. So we wrote it and now we're negotiating to write the script for it."

The Hyperion Cantos is a narratively ambitious science fiction series. The film adaptation has been rumored to take place over the course of the first two books, in which a group of individuals on a mission to 'The Time Tombs of Hyperion.' Along the way they each tell their own stories, a la The Canterbury Tales. The second two books take place hundreds of years later and abandon the anthology format.

Cooper said that "ideally" he'd love to direct the movie, but expressed some trepidation given the enormity of the project.

We like Cooper, but the last time an actor took on this kind of material himself we ended up with Kevin Costner's The Postman. Good luck, dude.